SAN JOSE MINE, Chile — Three days after 33 men were sealed deep within a gold mine, Andre Sougarret was summoned by Chile’s president.

The Chilean leader got right to the point: The square-jawed, straight-talking engineer would be in charge of digging them out.

At first Sougarret worried — no one knew if the miners were alive, and the pressure was on to reach them. And he knew he would be blamed if the men were found dead “because we didn’t reach them or the work was too slow.”

But eventually, contact was made, the work was on, and the miners below were calling him “boss.”

The mission was unprecedented. No one had ever drilled so far to reach trapped miners. No one knew where to find them.

From the first confusing days to this week’s glorious finale, the 46-year-old Sougarret was the man with the answers.

And at the end, the last miner to reach the surface, shift foreman Luis Urzua, would tell him: “People like you are worth a lot of money in Chile.”

Sougarret’s management of the crisis was so successful that nearly all the rescued miners walked out of the hospital Friday perfectly healthy. While a handful left through one door into a news media storm, most of the others were secreted away through a side entrance to be taken home, hospital officials said. Two of the miners required more attention and were transferred to other hospitals.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sougarret told how he assembled a team of experts and methodically worked the problem that would become the biggest challenge of his life.

In choosing the young Chilean mining expert, President Sebastian Pinera had turned to the man who ran the world’s most productive subterranean mine, El Teniente, for Chile’s state-owned Codelco copper company.

A methodical engineer who stays cool-headed under pressure, Sougarret said he tried not to dwell too much on the men he was trying to save.

“I never allowed myself to think about what was happening with them — that’s anxiety-causing,” he said. “I told myself, ‘My objective is to create an access, a connection. Put that in your head.’ ”

“Why they were there and what happened, that’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to get there and get them out.”

Sougarret flew immediately to the mine in Chile’s northern Atacama desert, and encountered a nest of confusion, with rescue workers, firefighters, police officers, volunteers and relatives desperate for word about the fate of their men down below.

Gently but firmly, Sougarret made his first move: ordering out the rescue workers until there was, in fact, someone to rescue. He asked for any maps of the mine and assembled a team, starting with Rene Aguilar, the 35-year-old risk manager at El Teniente.

In the weeks that followed, the two men built an operation that grew to more than 300 people.

Finally, on Aug. 22, came success: The drill broke through to the shaft about 150 feet from the miners’ refuge.

From the surface, the rescue team thought they could hear banging on the drill head. Pulling it up, they found a message tied in a plastic bag and pressed inside the thread of the drill: “We’re all OK in the refuge, the 33.”

In the days that followed, two more boreholes would break through, providing a life line for sending down food, medicine and messages of encouragement.

There was much talk during the rescue about controlling the information reaching the miners to keep them from becoming demoralized about how long the rescue would take.

But Sougarret always told them the truth.

Urzua, the shift foreman, had this to say as he hugged the man who saved the 33: “You always gave us the straight talk, always speaking the truth.”